Unexpected Benefits of a Home Weather Station

We recently got a home weather station for tracking actual conditions in our home and garden. Living far from a public weather station, this has provided us with far more accurate data than we’ve ever had with standard reports. While interesting for weather nerds, it’s actually quite handy for gardening as well.

Have a look at how it works as well as a few unexpected features we did not anticipate.

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Netatmo provided a Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and a rain gauge to test in our home and garden plus one set to give away to a lucky reader.

Measuring the Weather Where You Live

We spend hours a day in our living rooms, bedrooms and back yards, immersed in the air and environment in and around our houses. But other than the readings from a thermostat inside our house, we probably know very little about our home environment. And most of us have to rely on weather stations miles away—25 miles away, in our case—to know our outdoor temperatures.

The Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and its accessories look to fill that gap by giving you information about the environment in your house and yard. We’ve had the weather station and Netatmo Rain Gauge (sold separately) for a couple of weeks now, and have found it fun and informative in ways we wouldn’t have predicted.

The Netatmo Weather Station includes one outdoor and one indoor monitor.

What It Is

The Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone consists of two aluminum cylinders—sleek and simple in appearance and probably not at all what you imagine a weather station looks like.
The taller unit can be placed anywhere inside your house near an electrical outlet—you’ll probably choose either the living room or your bedroom. The shorter one is battery-powered and is mounted outside the house. The company suggests placing it under the overhang of your roof.

Both units contain sensors that measure temperature and humidity (indoor and out). The indoor module also measures sound and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Note: that’s CO2 and not the far more dangerous CO—carbon monoxide—which would have been fantastic to have, but quickly takes you into critical life-or-death scenarios, so I can understand why it’s not included.

The outdoor module sends its data wirelessly to the indoor base which connects to the Internet through your home Wi-Fi network. Because it’s connected in to the Internet, you can read your data—both current and historical, and with all sorts of graphs—from anywhere, through both a web browser and a smartphone app. Installation instructions are also provided through the app.

You can also choose to contribute your outdoor readings to a global network of Netatmo weather stations. The indoor readings remain private, but you can give individual people—family members, for example—access to the data on your web dashboard if you’d like.

On the Netatmo web site there’s a map [see the map here] with thousands of stations from around the world—and yours will be there too, if that’s what you decide. This is where you can turn when you’re interested in current conditions farther afield than your back yard, or if you want to compare your readings to another station nearby.

How We’ve Used It

Over the first two weeks, the temperature in our back yard ranged from 16°C to -8°C (about 60°F to 18°F) with some wild swings between winter and spring weather. That means we saw it at work in furnace weather, but not under air conditioner conditions.

Here’s a look at the temperatures over a few days:

So far, we’ve found that we refer to it every day—and usually several times a day. Maybe the novelty will wear off, but maybe not—we’ve always looked at the temperature and forecasts on most days, and now we have better (or at least more personalized) data than ever before.

It turns out that that government-run weather station that we’ve had to rely on for all these years (also used by AccuWeather) shows temperatures very different from what we actually experience, with daily highs differing by up to 8°C (14°F).

The graphs show you at a glance patterns that you may never have thought about. For example, you can clearly see how well your furnace is working, as a graph shows you how the temperature jumps once the furnace is on (hopefully). I don’t know how long we thought it took for the furnace to warm the house, but now we see how much the temperature climbs in just half an hour. It’s much more informative than a thermostat reading. We’re not expecting that the air conditioner will bring the same results, but it will be interesting to see how it does.

Our CO2 readings barely got above zero for the first few days and it didn’t seem like that part of the station was going to be of much interest. And then the day came when we didn’t have the furnace on overnight. Without the air being blown through the house, we could see how quickly the CO2 built up overnight in the bedroom. So now we turn the furnace fan on overnight and that keeps the CO2 at zero the whole time. And the room does feel fresher when you wake up.

We also had some unanticipated uses for the station’s indoor decibel readings. Allegedly, one of us snores, and with the indoor unit in the bedroom, this can be seen—clearly and undeniably—in the morning when we look at the graphs. We also found the unit was sensitive enough to pick up music played in the basement or TV in the living room, and you can see why other people in the house sometimes get annoyed with the sounds.

Netatmo Rain Gauge in the garden. We added the deck screws to keep the squirrels from knocking it over.

The rain gauge has worked well and just the way you’d expect. It gives you hourly readings of your rainfall in millimetres (you will learn that 1.5 mm/h isn’t much and 6 mm/h is). Because it measures accumulation over an hour, you won’t get a reading off the charts if you have a brief torrential downpour.

The gauge doesn’t really work with snow, at least not in real time. When there’s a snowfall, the snow falls into the gauge and sits there and you can be in a snowstorm and the reading will be zero. Then, hours later, when there’s no rain or snow, you’ll get a reading as the snow in the gauge starts to melt. But it may give you some idea of how much water from the melting snow went into the ground.

We haven’t had the station long enough to say how long the batteries last in the outdoor components. Netatmo says it will likely be several months before they need replacing and from what we’ve seen, that looks to be the case. After two weeks of continuous use, the batteries in both the outdoor unit and the rain gauge still show at full strength. The current levels are shown on your web dashboard, so you won’t have to guess when they’re getting low.

The one annoyance we had was during installation—which is surprising (and preventable) since the process is actually very simple. For some steps, the instructions were just too sparse. You can tell from the look of the units how much Netatmo values design simplicity, but with the instructions they sometimes put simplicity over users’ needs for clear guidance. We figured it out, and you will too, but some details would have prevented the frustrations we had.

One thing to be aware of: immediately after you’ve installed the units, as you eagerly go to the app or website to see your first readings, there’s a good chance most of them will be way off. Handling the units—as you will during installation—distorts almost all of the readings and they don’t settle immediately. It took a couple of hours before we had accurate readings, but they’ve been fine ever since.

About Melissa J. Will

Melissa J. Will is a home and garden blogger (writer, photographer, artist) from Ontario, Canada. Favourite obsessions include repurposed DIY projects and tutorials, organic gardening, creative garden ideas, debt-free living, nature (what more is there?), and sustainable living—all with a dash of humour and side order of freshly-grown salad greens.

Comments

I had one to try out too. It was very interesting and provided lots of good data. I really liked checking out the weather maps of all the stations across Canada and around the world. Perhaps I will be the lucky winner of one to keep.

A Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and a rain gauge sounds like fun. We l;eave in a very rural area far from a weather station and have several outdoor thermometers around the property plus a couple of rain gauges in the vegetable patch. Close to the house the temps are usually higher by 2-4 degrees F (probably because we live in a drafty old farm house).

The Netatmo Westher Station for Smartphone & Rain Gauge would be a big help. We live on a mountain top in NY and our weather is very different than the weather at the bottom of the mountain! What an interesting way to keep track of the differneces.

I would love to win the Weather Station for smartphone and Rain Gauge. I’m from Massachusetts. My husband is a weather nerd because he’s a landscape contractor by trade and needs to watch the weather before he starts a job. I love getting him interesting weather related things. This would be right up his alley. Thank you for your generosity.

The Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and Rain Gauge would be a fantastic addition to my straw bale garden. I’m disabled, so cannot garden in the “normal” fashion. Like you, I find that weather at the nearest airport is not what I experience at my home.

I would love to have one of your Netatmo Weather Stations and Rain Gauges. I am disabled and do my gardening in pots on the deck, have been for years. I belong to several different weather apps on my phone and computer and they sure do NOT agree with the weather at my house. Wow they look great and sounds like they are a good feature to have for one’s home. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Hi and thanks so much for the smiles and understanding just how much joy comes from dirt!
I would love the weather station because here in New Brunswick the weather in the morning may not be the same in the afternoon, heck wait 5 mins and you get something different. So some sort of weather warning would be a joy.
Your majesties humble follower (bow)

I would really like to own The Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone & Rain Gauge system. Weather here in northern Michigan can change rapidly and the temperatures we get online can be really wrong. Having my own weather station would make this homeowner and gardener very happy. Thank you for the chance to win one.

What a good looking and handy weather station! I can see how it would be very valuable to our house. We live in an area that is referred to as a banana belt because the rest of the town is up hill and cooler, so the weatherman is always incorrect in his prediction for us.

A remote rain gauge would be a great tool at our weekend home. We’re in a forestry program and have planted lots of saplings. It would be nice to know if we actually got rain or if a storm passed us by.

Having reported weather conditions from light stations in British Columbia for nearly six years back in the 80’s and 90’s, I have a keen interest in weather and would absolutely LOVE The Netatmo Weather Station. I now live in Southwestern Ontario.

Having a Netatmo Weather Station and rain gauge would be neat esp with all the fluctuations we have been having this spring. I hope the weather guy is wrong when he predicted frost and maybe snow flurries for tonight. It is supposed to be spring here in Ohio!!

What fun a Netatmo weather station and rain guage look like they would provide hours of educating fun. I currently live in the southern most tip of Illinois but will soon move to the center of the state and this would help me learn about the new climate.

My husband used to have a job that required him to be largely outdoors. He developed a bit of an obsession with the weather then, and his habit lives on, as he checks The Weather Network on his phone & the thermometer multiple times in a day. I’m the opposite: I look outside, stick my head out, & play it by ear, as in my opinion, the weather predictions are wrong 50% of the time. Not knowing the weather isn’t so good for my gardening. Winning the Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and a rain gauge would certainly make more informed about what’s happening out there (and in the house too) , and no doubt improve my gardening results, especially with the yo-yo conditions we’ve had around Barrie, Ontario (we live just north of there) the past few months. And it would make give my husband another way to indulge his habit (obsession?)

I would love to surprise my husband with a Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and a rain gauge. We monitor the weather very closely due to having a farm. Our days are planned lots around the weather so this would be very beneficial to us. We are always monitoring how much rain we have. It is marked on the calendar whenever we get rain. We live in Alberta.

The Netatmo Weather Station and Rain Guage would be so helpful in our new attempts at organic gardening. I grow flowers and my daughter grows vegetables. Knowing when to water is an important part of the process in addition to following the daily weather. I’m a bit of a weatge geek so would have great fun with it.

My brother, whose birthday is next month, keeps close tabs on the weather via some sort of specialized radio. I know he would adore a Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and Rain Gauge and hope to win it as a gift for him for his birthday. Thank you for the opportunity to win this weather station and gauge, Netatmo and Empress Melissa.

The Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and Rain Gauge would be awesome to use with my great-granddaughter Scarlett. We love to do projects together. Love all your ideas Empress, thanks for sharing with us. Modesto, California

The Netatmo Weather Station for Smartphone and Rain Gauge is a must have for anyone living in Florida! I’d love it. 🙂 Great news letter too Empress of Dirt! I’ve used several of your ideas and learned a lot. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

WOW!! How cool would that be to win a Netatmo Weather Station for Smart Phone + Rain Gauge. Thank you for that chance and thanks for the wonderful and thought provoking articles that you have furnished for us peeps out in the Cyberland. They really are interesting ..

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